


Folk Heroes

by Bruce J (HowNovel)



Category: Starman (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1993-02-04
Updated: 1993-02-04
Packaged: 2017-11-04 07:34:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/391352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HowNovel/pseuds/Bruce%20J
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eager to put down some roots somewhere after months on the run, Scott protests his and Paul's wandering lifestyle in an unusual way and searches for his identity in a place that's also looking for its own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Folk Heroes

FOLK HEROES

It was mid-April and spring had come to the Northern Hemisphere of the planet Earth. Paul Forrester looked with wondering eyes at all the new life growing, blooming, and sprouting. He understood the celestial mechanics of seasons: orbital inclination, the laws of planetary motion, gravity and relativity, but he’d never realized how beautiful and sublime the effects of those things could be until he came to this world. The changing seasons of Earth were mystical, almost magical in their shifting rhythms, cycles of life and death and change intermingling and overlapping. It was incredible. Most of the Universe was sterile, barren, and antiseptic, but the Earth was teeming with life, life rich with surprising complexity, depth and diversity.

Paul sighed as he left the glorious spring weather and entered the apartment he and Scott had rented for the past three weeks. He went into the kitchen and set his camera on the table. It had been a long day, and he was tired. That was a sensation he’d never quite gotten used to. Most of the time he found it satisfying, although exhaustion had been a dangerous foe at times in his flight from FSA agent George Fox.

He went out to the back yard, back into the warm, energizing sunshine, where his son Scott was helping Mrs. Ross, their landlady, plant vegetables in the garden. Scott had developed a sudden compulsion for gardening, perhaps because he was so desperate to put down his own roots somewhere, and Mrs. Ross had been delighted to find such a capable and enthusiastic helper. Scott’s foster father had been a florist, so Scott was no stranger to gardens and flowerbeds.

“Hi Scott,” Paul greeted.

Scott looked up from the furrow he was digging. “Hi dad!” he said, his face baked by the sun and caked with sweat and dirt.

“Why don’t you come in and wash up,” Paul said, “and I’ll make dinner.”

“Oh no,” Mrs. Ross said, in her thick German accent. “Your son has earned the two of you a place at my dinner table tonight.”

“Thank you,” Paul said.

“Great!” Scott said. He gratefully dropped the shovel and followed his father into the house.

Paul did some tidying up while Scott showered. Scott had dumped his schoolbooks on the couch, and Paul shook his head and smiled as he picked them up and took them down to Scott’s room. Teenage boys sure were messy!

Paul stopped when he entered the room and saw the contraption occupying most of Scott’s desk. He thought to himself, _What in the world?_ He looked over the assemblage of pipes and boxes, anxious and puzzled at first, until a kind of resigned concern fell on him as he realized what he was looking at.

Scott came in, head under a towel as he dried his hair. “You have to take them back, Scott,” Paul said firmly.

“They’re very small, Dad,” Scott said, leaping immediately to the defense. “And see this?” He picked up a small cage, about six inches on a side. “I can carry them in this.”

Paul shook his head. “I know how you feel, Scott, but it’s too dangerous. It would take too much time to get them in the carrying cage. And they’re small and helpless. What would happen to them if we had to leave them behind?” Paul shuddered. He disliked cages.

Scott let out an exasperated gasp. “They’re easily portable, Dad. Trust me!”

“We’ve talked about pets and why we can’t have them,” Paul reminded.

“Please, Dad, I want to keep them!”

Paul sighed. He looked at the little rodents milling about in the largest box of the habitat. “What are they?”

“Gerbils,” Scott said. “I named them Bonnie and Clyde,” he added proudly.

Paul frowned. “Bonnie and Clyde?”

“Uh,” Scott said. “They’re, uh, American folk heroes.”

Paul nodded. “Oh.” There was more to that story, but he knew Scott wouldn’t tell him. Not just yet, anyway.

“So I can keep them?” Scott’s voice was pleading.

“They’re your responsibility.”

“Yes!” Scott exclaimed. “Thanks, dad,” he added, giving Paul a quick hug.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“You seem very preoccupied this evening,” Mrs. Ross said, as Paul helped her with the after-dinner dishes. Scott had eaten about a ton of her beef stew, vegetables, and home-baked bread and was “conked out” on the living room couch.

Paul looked at his landlady. She was a spry and active woman for her eighty years, and she had a gift for perception and conversation. “I’m worried about Scott,” he said.

She nodded. “He has told me, about the traveling, the search for his mother. He seems lonely for a young man his age.”

Paul bit his lip and nodded. “It’s my fault,” he said. “I wish it could be different, but....”

“There are so many troubling stories in the news these days,” Mrs. Ross said, scrubbing a plate dry. “Divorce, child abuse…you are a good father, Paul. Scott is not so unfortunate.”

Paul smiled. “Did he tell you he bought gerbils?”

“Oh yes. He was quite excited about it.”

Paul nodded. “I’ve told him we can’t have pets, because I never know how long we’ll be able to stay in one place. But he didn’t listen.”

Mrs. Ross stopped drying and looked at him. “Your son is talking, not listening.”

“What?”

“By not listening to you, he is trying to tell you something.”

Paul’s brow furrowed in confusion. “What is he trying to tell me?”

“That he needs some stability. People are like plants, Paul. They need to have roots. Rich soil that will nurture them and give them what they need to grow. Scott is searching for his identity.”

Paul was confused. “But he already knows his identity. He’s Scott Hayden, my son. He knows who he is.”

“But he doesn’t know what he is, what he will become.”

Paul looked at her in alarm. “What has he told you?”

“It’s not so much what he’s said as it is what I have felt from him. He feels isolated, Paul. He needs friends, companions his age. He should be out hot-rodding or whatever it is teenagers do in this day and age, not gardening with an old lady.”

Paul sighed, partly out of relief, partly out of resignation.

“He’s like any young person,” she concluded. “Trying to find his place in the world.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“Scott,” Paul said, as his son got ready for bed. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

Scott expectorated the water he was swishing in his mouth. “What’s on your mind?”

“I want to help you find your place in the world,” Paul said earnestly.

Scott laughed. “Oh, is that all.” Noting his father’s troubled look, he became more serious. “You’re already doing that, dad.”

Paul looked at him doubtfully. “I am?”

“Yes. I’m not going to find my place in the world overnight.”

Paul looked at him anxiously. “How long will it take?”

Scott shrugged. “Years, probably. I don’t even know what I want to do, yet.”

Paul sighed. “I knew it was going to be complicated as soon as Mrs. Ross mentioned it.”

Scott grinned. “What did she say?”

“That you need friends. She’s concerned about you, Scott, and so am I.”

Scott looked away. “I’ll get by,” he said.

“Will you?”

“Goodnight, Dad,” Scott said, abruptly ending the conversation. He went into his room, unsettled and deep in thought. It was true that he’d been trying hard to hang on to this place, maybe too hard. He was just tired of moving around all the time, and couldn’t even face the thought of having to leave here. But then a rattling noise caught his attention and the greatest of equalizers, humor, returned his sense of perspective. “Atta boy, Clyde,” Scott said wryly to the gerbil, as it sprinted in the habitat’s squirrel cage. “You gotta know how to run if you want to be part of this family.”


End file.
